The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated

by Cordwainer Smith

  She knelt down on the floor and spoke gently directly into the ear of Colonel Harkening.

  “Canst thou hear me, brother? I have come to help thee. I am thy sister Liana. I am thy sister under the love of God. I am thy sister born of the flesh of man. I am thy sister under the sky. I am thy sister come to help thee. I am thy sister, brother. I am thy sister. Waken a little and I can help thee. Waken a little to the words of thy sister. Waken a little for the love and the hope. Waken to let the love come in. Waken to let the love awaken thee further. Waken to let mankind get thee. Waken to return again, return again to the realm of man. The realm of man is a friendly realm. The friendship of man is a friendly thing. Thy friend is thy sister, by the name of Liana. Thy friend is here. Waken a little to the words of thy friend…”

  As she talked on I saw that she made a gentle movement with her left hand, motioning us out of the room.

  I nodded to my two colleagues, jerking my head to indicate that we should step out in the corridor. We stepped just beyond the door so that we could still look in.

  The child went on with her endless chant.

  Grosbeck stood rigid, glaring at her as though she were an intrusion into the field of regular medicine. Timofeyev tried to look sweet, benevolent, and spiritual; he forgot and, instead, just looked excited. I got very tired and began to wonder when I could interrupt the child. It did not seem to me that she was getting anywhere.

  She herself settled the matter.

  She burst into tears.

  She went on talking as she wept, her voice broken with sobs, the tears from her eyes pouring down her cheeks and dropping on the face of the colonel just below her face.

  The colonel might as well have been made of porcelainized concrete.

  I could see his breathing, but the pupils of his eyes did not move. He was no more alive than he had been all these weeks. No more alive, and no less alive.

  No change. At last the girl gave up her weeping and talking and came out to the corridor to us.

  She spoke to me directly. “Art thou a brave man, Anderson, sir and doctor, Chief and Leader.”

  It was a silly question. How does anybody answer a question like that? All I could say was “I suppose so. What do you want to do?”

  “I want you three,” said she as solemnly as a witch. “I want you three to wear the helmet of the pinlighters and ride with me into hell itself. That soul is lost. It is frozen by a force I do not know, frozen out beyond the stars, where the stars caught it and made it their own, so that the poor man and brother that thou seest is truly among us, but his soul weeps in the unholy pleasure between the stars where it is lost to the mercy of God and to the friendship of mankind. Wilt thou, O brave man, sir and doctor, Chief and Leader, ride with me to hell itself?”

  What could I say but yes?

  III. The Return

  Late that night we made the return from the Nothing-at-All. There were five pinlighters’ helmets, crude things, mechanical correctives to natural telepathy, devices to throw the synapses of one mind into another so that all five of us could think the same thoughts.

  It was the first time that I had been in contact with the minds of Grosbeck and Timofeyev. They surprised me.

  Timofeyev really was clean all the way through, as clean and simple as washed linen. He was really a very simple man. The urgencies and pressures of his everyday life did not go down to the insides.

  Grosbeck was very different. He was as alive, as cackling, and as violent as a whole barnyard full of fowl: His mind was dirty in spots, clean in others. It was bright, smelly, alive, vivid, moving.

  I caught an echo of my own mind from them. To Timofeyev I seemed cold, high, icy, and mysterious; to Grosbeck I looked like a solid lump of coal. He couldn’t see into my mind very much and he didn’t even want to.

  We all sensed out toward Liana, and in reaching for the sense-of-the-mind of Liana we encountered the mind of the colonel…

  Never have I encountered something so terrible.

  It was raw pleasure.

  As a doctor I have seen pleasure—the pleasure of morphine which destroys, the pleasure of fennine which kills and ruins, even the pleasure of the electrode buried in the living brain.

  As a doctor I had been required to see the wickedest of men kill themselves under the law. It was a simple thing we did. We put a thin wire directly into the pleasure center of the brain. The bad man then put his head near an electric field of the right phase and voltage. It was simple enough. He died of pleasure in a few hours.

  This was worse.

  This pleasure was not in human form.

  Liana was somewhere near and I caught her thoughts as she said, “We must go there, sirs and doctors, Chiefs and Leaders.

  “We must go there together, the four of us, go to where no man was, go to the Nothing-at-All, go to the hope and the heart of the pain, go to the pain which return may this man, go to the power which is greater than space, go to the power which has sent him home, go to the place which is not a place, find the force which is not a force, force the force which is not a force to give this heart and spare it back to us.

  “Come with me if you come at all. Come with me to the end of things. Come with me—”

  Suddenly there was a flash as of sheet lightning in our minds.

  It was bright lightning, bright, delicate, multicolored, gentle. Suffusing everything, it was like a cascade of pure color, pastel in hue, but intense in its brightness. The light came.

  The light came, I say.

  Strange.

  And it was gone.

  That was all.

  The experience was so quick that it could hardly be called instantaneous. It seemed to happen less than instantaneously, if you can imagine that. We all five felt that we had been befriended, looked at. We felt that we had been made the toys or the pets of some gigantic form of life immensely beyond the limits of human imagination, and that that life in looking at the four of us—the three doctors and Liana—had seen us and the colonel and had realized that the colonel needed to go back to his own kind.

  Because it was five, not four, who stood up.

  The colonel was trembling, but he was sane. He was alive. He was human again. He said very weakly:

  “Where am I? Is this an Earth hospital?”

  And then he fell into Timofeyev’s arms.

  Liana was already gliding out the door.

  I followed her out.

  She turned on me. “Sir and doctor, Chief and Leader, all I ask is no thanks, and no money, no notice and no word of what has happened. My powers come from the goodness of the Lord’s grace and from the friendliness of mankind. I should not intrude into the field of medicine. I should not have come if thy friend Timofeyev had not asked me as a matter of common mercy. Claim the credit for thy hospital, sir and doctor, Chief and Leader, but thou and thy friends should forget me.”

  I stammered at her, “But the reports?…”

  “Write the reports any way thou wishes, but mention me not.”

  “But our patient. He is our patient, too, Liana.”

  She smiled a smile of great sweetness, of girlish and childish friendliness. “If he need me, I shall come to him…”

  The world was better, but not much the wiser.

  The chronoplast spaceship was never found. The colonel’s return was never explained. The colonel never left Earth again. All he knew was that he had pushed a button out somewhere near the Moon and that he had then awakened in a hospital after four months had been unaccountably lost.

  And all the world knew was that he and his wife had unaccountably adopted a strange but beautiful little girl, poor in family, but rich in the mild generosity of her own spirit.

  I. The Table

  Pinlighting is a hell of a way to earn a living, Underhill was furious as he closed the door behind himself. It didn’t make much sense to wear a uniform and look like a soldier if people didn’t appreciate what you did.

  He sat down in his chair, laid h
is head back in the headrest, and pulled the helmet down over his forehead.

  As he waited for the pin-set to warm up, he remembered the girl in the outer corridor. She had looked at it, then looked at him scornfully.

  “Meow.” That was all she had said. Yet it had cut him like a knife.

  What did she think he was—a fool, a loafer, a uniformed nonentity? Didn’t she know that for every half-hour of pinlighting, he got a minimum of two months’ recuperation in the hospital?

  By now the set was warm. He felt the squares of space around him, sensed himself at the middle of an immense grid, a cubic grid, full of nothing. Out in that nothingness, he could sense the hollow aching horror of space itself and could feel the terrible anxiety which his mind encountered whenever it met the faintest trace of inert dust.

  As he relaxed, the comforting solidity of the Sun, the clockwork of the familiar planets and the Moon rang in on him. Our own solar system was as charming and as simple as an ancient cuckoo clock filled with familiar ticking and with reassuring noises. The odd little moons of Mars swung around their planet like frantic mice, yet their regularity was itself an assurance that all was well. Far above the plane of the ecliptic, he could feel half a ton of dust more or less drifting outside the lanes of human travel.

  Here there was nothing to fight, nothing to challenge the mind, to tear the living soul out of a body with its roots dripping in effluvium as tangible as blood.

  Nothing ever moved in on the solar system. He could wear the pin-set forever and be nothing more than a sort of telepathic astronomer, a man who could feel the hot, warm protection of the Sun throbbing and burning against his living mind.

  Woodley came in.

  “Same old ticking world,” said Underhill. “Nothing to report. No wonder they didn’t develop the pin-set until they began to planoform. Down here with the hot Sun around us, it feels so good and so quiet. You can feel everything spinning and turning. It’s nice and sharp and compact. It’s sort of like sitting around home.”

  Woodley grunted. He was not much given to flights of fantasy.

  Undeterred, Underhill went on, “It must have been pretty good to have been an ancient man. I wonder why they burned up their world with war. They didn’t have to planoform. They didn’t have to go out to earn their livings among the stars. They didn’t have to dodge the Rats or play the Game. They couldn’t have invented pinlighting because they didn’t have any need of it, did they, Woodley?”

  Woodley grunted, “Uh-huh.” Woodley was twenty-six years old and due to retire in one more year. He already had a farm picked out. He had gotten through ten years of hard work pinlighting with the best of them. He had kept his sanity by not thinking very much about his job, meeting the strains of the task whenever he had to meet them, and thinking nothing more about his duties until the next emergency arose.

  Woodley never made a point of getting popular among the Partners. None of the Partners liked him very much. Some of them even resented him. He was suspected of thinking ugly thoughts of the Partners on occasion, but since none of the Partners ever thought a complaint in articulate form, the other pinlighters and the Chiefs of the Instrumentality left him alone.

  Underhill was still full of the wonder of their job. Happily he babbled on, “What does happen to us when we planoform? Do you think it’s sort of like dying? Did you ever see anybody who had his soul pulled out?”

  “Pulling souls is just a way of talking about it,” said Woodley. “After all these years, nobody knows whether we have souls or not.”

  “But I saw one once. I saw what Dogwood looked like when he came apart. There was something funny. It looked wet and sort of sticky as if it were bleeding and it went out of him—and you know what they did to Dogwood? They took him away, up in that part of the hospital where you and I never go—way up at the top part where the others are, where the others always have to go if they are alive after the Rats of the Up-and-Out have gotten them.”

  Woodley sat down and lit an ancient pipe. He was burning something called tobacco in it. It was a dirty sort of habit, but it made him look very dashing and adventurous.

  “Look here, youngster. You don’t have to worry about that stuff. Pinlighting is getting better all the time. The Partners are getting better. I’ve seen them pinlight two Rats forty-six million miles apart in one and a half milliseconds. As long as people had to try to work the pin-sets themselves, there was always the chance that with a minimum of four-hundred milliseconds for the human mind to set a pinlight, we wouldn’t light the Rats up fast enough to protect our planoforming ships. The Partners have changed all that. Once they get going, they’re faster than Rats. And they always will be. I know it’s not easy, letting a Partner share your mind—”

  “It’s not easy for them, either,” said Underhill.

  “Don’t worry about them. They’re not human. Let them take care of themselves. I’ve seen more pinlighters go crazy from monkeying around with Partners than I have ever seen caught by the Rats. How many of them do you actually know of that got grabbed by Rats?”

  Underhill looked down at his fingers, which shone green and purple in the vivid light thrown by the tuned-in pin-set, and counted ships. The thumb for the Andromeda, lost with crew and passengers, the index finger and the middle finger for Release Ships 43 and 56, found with their pin-sets burned out and every man, woman, and child on board dead or insane. The ring finger, the little finger, and the thumb of the other hand were the first three battleships to be lost to the Rats—lost as people realized that there was something out there underneath space itself which was alive, capricious, and malevolent.

  Planoforming was sort of funny. It felt like—

  Like nothing much.

  Like the twinge of a mild electric shock.

  Like the ache of a sore tooth bitten on for the first time.

  Like a slightly painful flash of light against the eyes.

  Yet in that time, a forty-thousand-ton ship lifting free above Earth disappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half a light-year or fifty light-years off.

  At one moment, he would be sitting in the Fighting Room, the pin-set ready and the familiar solar system ticking around inside his head. For a second or a year (he could never tell how long it really was, subjectively), the funny little flash went through him and then he was loose in the Up-and-Out, the terrible open spaces between the stars, where the stars themselves felt like pimples on his telepathic mind and the planets were too far away to be sensed or read.

  Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and horror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached out for interstellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns kept the Dragons away.

  Dragons. That was what people called them. To ordinary people, there was nothing, nothing except the shiver of planoforming and the hammer blow of sudden death or the dark spastic note of lunacy descending into their minds.

  But to the telepaths, they were Dragons.

  In the fraction of a second between the telepaths’ awareness of a hostile something out in the black, hollow nothingness of space and the impact of a ferocious, ruinous psychic blow against all living things within the ship, the telepaths had sensed entities something like the Dragons of ancient human lore, beasts more clever than beasts, demons more tangible than demons, hungry vortices of aliveness and hate compounded by unknown means out of the thin, tenuous matter between the stars.

  It took a surviving ship to bring back the news—a ship in which, by sheer chance, a telepath had a light-beam ready, turning it out at the innocent dust so that, within the panorama of his mind, the Dragon dissolved into nothing at all and the other passengers, themselves non-telepathic, went about their way not realizing that their own immediate deaths had been averted.

  From then on, it was easy—almost.

  Planoforming ships always carried telepaths. Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were te
lepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind. The pin-sets in turn were electronically geared into small dirigible light bombs. Light did it.

  Light broke up the Dragons, allowed the ships to reform three-dimensionally, skip, skip, skip, as they moved from star to star.

  The odds suddenly moved down from a hundred to one against mankind to sixty to forty in mankind’s favor.

  This was not enough. The telepaths were trained to become ultrasensitive, trained to become aware of the Dragons in less than a millisecond.

  But it was found that the Dragons could move a million miles in just under two milliseconds and that this was not enough for the human mind to activate the light beams.

  Attempts had been made to sheathe the ships in light at all times.

  This defense wore out.

  As mankind learned about the Dragons, so too, apparently, the Dragons learned about mankind. Somehow they flattened their own bulk and came in on extremely flat trajectories very quickly.

  Intense light was needed, light of sunlike intensity. This could be provided only by light bombs. Pinlighting came into existence.

  Pinlighting consisted of the detonation of ultra-vivid miniature photonuclear bombs, which converted a few ounces of a magnesium isotope into pure visible radiance.

  The odds kept coming down in mankind’s favor, yet ships were being lost.

  It became so bad that people didn’t even want to find the ships because the rescuers knew what they would see. It was sad to bring back to Earth three hundred bodies ready for burial and two hundred or three hundred lunatics, damaged beyond repair, to be wakened, and fed, and cleaned, and put to sleep, wakened and fed again until their lives were ended.

  Telepaths tried to reach into the minds of the psychotics who had been damaged by the Dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vivid spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id itself, the volcanic source of life.